Despite being hooked to the iCloud environment (we have a 4s and an iPad 2), I’m still a believer in Dropbox. Whereas I was forced to use iCloud, I chose to still sign up for a Dropbox account because it really makes document sharing more efficient while being platform-agnostic. The only problem with it is outside the 3GB of free space on my account (acquired from referrals) you need to pay for space, which is quite understandable given their “freemium” business model. So when I found out that they were bumping up their free space to up to 5GB if you participated in a beta program, I immediately got started.
Dropbox recently launched a new photo sync service that copies files directly from your digital camera to the cloud. For every 500MB of space you upload, they give you 500MB of cloud space. That would mean if you’re gunning for 2GB of space to reach 5GB, you will need to upload 2GB worth of photos or video from your camera. Note that merely transferring photos from your HD will not work. You will need to plug in your camera and Dropbox will automatically detect it and prompt you to start transferring. It doesn’t work with a plugged in iPhone.
“I wanted to be able to show that poverty doesn’t have to be a hindrance to be able to do loving acts. Even if you are materially poor, if you have the dedication and if you refuse to lose your human dignity, it’s still possible for you to help others, (…)â€
Got home to a big surprise! The Department of Tourism has linked my “It’s More Fun” meme tutorialonto their front page under Fun Stuff! I’m really happy that the blog has been recognized in this way.
The site also links back to other amazing works from fellow netizens as well as official “It’s More Fun” wallpapers, social network avatars, and animated logos. Great work!
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Last week I got a glimpse of the new DOT tourism video while at an IMMAP function. Sec. Mon Jimenez was the guest of honor and showed us the 90% completed ‘It’s More Fun’ PH tourism video. All I have to say is that it’s really amazing and something we can be very proud of. The video managed to portray an accurate as well as positive image of our country’s diversity in people and natural resources. It’s so good, people were too engaged to even snap it with their cameras.
It’s definitely more fun in the Philippines! Thanks for the heads up, Corey!=)
So Pinterest came first. Pinspire followed next, albeit rather quickly. Pinterest needs no introduction. But if it did, I’d say: If Path is the hot new social network of 2012, Pinterest is “new Tumblr of 2012.” Developed by the Samwer Brothers of Rocket Internet, Pinsire is a fascinating copy of the former.
So what gives? Rocket Internet’s strategy is to take concepts on beta and replicate them into their huge global network. The end result is well, something close to the original but scaled for regions that it otherwise would not be able to reach. End of the day, we can go on and on about copying a site and its features (in this case, copying most of it) but you will notice that the communities are both very different.
In any case, no harm in trying out both. We have a small offer for you though — and it’s for Pinspire, because they wanted some ad space on this little blog. If you want to win some great Apple products, courtesy of these guys, just follow these steps:
STEP 2
Put the pin link in the comments section. Like this: http://www.pinspire.com/board/show/267972 < -- That's my underwater album.
STEP 3
Promote it like crazy!
The most popular board wins an 8GB iPod Touch.
The top succeeding 10 boards win a 2GB iPod Shuffle each.
The popularity will be aggregately determined by the number of board followers, likes and comments. The winners will be announced on February 29, 2012. Deadline of entries is on midnight of February 25, 2012
N.B. Pinspire is an advertiser on this blog.
EDIT: I was listening to an episode of TWiT three days ago and the end result of the controversy is exactly what I outline in the latter part of this post.
As of last week, most of your SEO tactics are rendered obsolescent. Somewhat.
Last year, Google’s top level mandate was “to go social.” And that reflected havily on Google employees with regards to performance so much so that company bonuses were to be directly associated with how Google performed in “social.” So last week, in the week of CES 2012, Google unveiled (secretly) its full blown foray into the new search algorithm making use of your social profile, starting with Google+. Google+ isn’t just a social network then. It does so much more:
– it helps Google see whether the content you post is actually yours and not scraped from somewhere else. How does it know which sites are yours? Well, your G+ profile under “About Me.” See the image on top? It says I contribute to A Bugged Life, NUDI (our SCUBA site), and Geekout (I write there once in a while). I’m not sure if this can be gamed — like I can ask 100 friends to say that they write on my blog to increase SERP, but then again this new tailored search feature will show different results depending on the account you hold. In other words, if you ask an SEO guy to work on your site and he gives you a screenshot of your blog on the first page of Google, that may be true for his or her account, but you may see something completely different. That’s how powerful the implications are for this new method. So be aware.
– it looks at other popular social sites (in this case Twitter and Flickr) and sees whether you own accounts currently signed in to. It links several popular social networks to G+ including Flickr, Twitter, Quora, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo!, and more. I hope it starts linking Tumblr and Pinterest soon. This makes me wonder whether sites like Path and Instagram should have official web versions for showing content (apart from Followgram) so they can get linked and indexed.
– Your “SEO” is only as good as how engaging you are with your content. There you have it — that is still the core ideal of “relevant content” but this time tied to your friends and what they share as well. If you +1 something, it means that you’re going to want more of that in your search results. In the same way, if you spam a friend, he or she can easily un-friend you and that’s it — bye bye social graph. Talk about tailored search.
– This new algorithm allows you to flourish in your preferred social space (as long as you have a Google+ profile HAHA!) whether it be a blog, Twitter, Quora, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. In other words, “blogging” is not the foundation of Web 2.0 (or whatever it’s called nowadays).
In short, for those of you saying that Google+ is useless and boring compared to Facebook, think again. Your site’s SEO will be determined by how much time you’ve invested in G+, the type of friends that you have, and what they share. Welcome to the new search. Now stop selling links.
